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Services Science and Engineering - overview

IBM researchers in Service Sciences and Engineering explore the challenges in the science and engineering of design, development, offering, delivery and automation of services in the enterprise, the economy and society at large. Researchers under the umbrella of Service Science, as a new discipline over the past decade, have conducted research in a cross-disciplinary context covering multiple disciplines from information systems, enterprise computing, business process management, etc. for business services and other services to citizens, government and the society. In an enterprise context, offering technology-enabled services to other enterprise and government entities have raised a complex set of technological challenges ranging technology management, workforce optimization, service pipeline management, and insource and outsource decision analytics, among others. The research area has continued to be transformed recently due to the confluence of AI, cognitive computing and advanced machine learning on all aspects of services.

Our interest is in the nexus of this cross-disciplinary research, including the study of theory, methods and practice, in the following areas

• Service Analytics - Exploring the use and application of advanced analytic technologies, on big data footprints in the enterprise, to address the definition, sales, development, planning and delivery of business and technology services and business analytic challenges faced by enterprises.

• Service Innovation –Explore new models of service offering and delivery in the enterprise for models such as brokerage, partnership, technology-enabled, metered (subscription-based), customer co-innovation, etc.

• Service Engineering –Explore and investigate the engineering methods for next generation service systems, enterprise and service architecture, and methodological sales and delivery of service offerings in hybrid environments over cloud and traditional environments, and hybrid workforce consisting of employees, contractors and crowdsourced workforce.

• Cognitive Services and Services for Cognitive –Investigate and envision the future of services (both business and technology) around cognitive technology, and cognitive-enablement of the current services business covering the full lifecycle of offering definitions, sales of services, customer onboarding, service delivery automation, and cognitive business process automation for services.